I’m midway through teaching a course at Antioch University Seattle called Unreal Fiction and Film. Every week we pair a film or selection of shorts with a short story. The class is scheduled from 7-10 PM on Mondays, a brutal slot, but every week I’ve left invigorated by the discussion.

In July, 2010, I delivered a keynote address at Goddard College’s MFA Writing residency in Port Townsend, Washington, on the theme “Composing the Wilderness.” This essay is included in an anthology of addresses given by Goddard College MFA faculty, to be published in early 2011.

Last week for my Hugo House class on using experimental films as writing prompts we spent 88 glorious minutes with House, the 1977 Japanese haunted pajama party freak-out directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi. This week we puzzled ourselves with three stop-motion animated shorts.

Are there some films you have to take drugs to enjoy? I asked this question toward the end of this week’s session of the class on experimental films I’m teaching at Richard Hugo House, after spending two hours with the films of Kenneth Anger.

I taught another session of my Experimental Films as Writing Prompts class at Hugo House last night. This one we looked at some films by Stan Brakhage. At the outset of the class I admitted that I had no idea what the hell was going to happen, how they would react to the shorts I was about to show, or whether the session would prove to have any value whatsoever.

I’m teaching a class at Richard Hugo House in which we look at experimental films as writing prompts. I’ve always wanted to teach a film class, and marrying writing exercises to viewings of films seemed like a good way to shoehorn this desire into a nonprofit literary arts center.

You want to watch an on-demand movie with your wife, something funny, something in which you can become invested in the characters’ problems, something from the “New Arrivals” section, and you keep scrolling back to It’s Complicated, a film starring Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin, and you hate yourself a little bit for even considering it, but

If you’re like me, you grew up running various scenarios about what you’d do if the world were to end. Would you go nuts and run around in a stadium wearing a woman’s slip like the guy in The Quiet Earth?

On New Year’s Day this year I removed all the bookmarks from my Firefox bookmarks bar. When I mentioned to a couple friends that my resolution was to lay off the political blogs, I got variations on the same response: Yeah, that’s a pretty popular resolution right now.

I finally let my son Miles watch Star Wars, the cinematic force that penetrates us and binds us together. It brought back memories of previous viewings, and a memory of getting in trouble for drawing genitals on a picture of C3PO. ...more

Oscilloscope Laboratories is the movie studio helmed by Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys. MCA isn't just fucking around, he's serious about quality films. For proof, look no further than the devastating documentary by Kurt Kuenne, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. ...more

My family was recently out of town for a five days, leaving me home alone with over 800 pages (no exaggeration) of student work to read and comment upon. My reward for getting through a day of writing about free indirect style and character arcs was to watch a lot of movies, both in the theater and at home, cranked up loud on the home system and with a fuckin’ beer in my hand.

When you grow up being called a faggot by farm boys because you like to read books, Woody Allen can appear as something of a savior. That’s my story, anyway. Allen’s early films with their broad appeal mean that even small town video rental stores are obliged to carry his work, shelving Interiors beside Bananas in the comedy section.

Years ago I happened upon a series of arresting images on cable. There was a young Mick Jagger cavorting in a bath tub with two svelte beauties. A child wearing a fake mustache. A still image of Jorge Luis Borges rising out of a gunshot wound to the head.

Sometimes I just want an actor to take a movie by the fuckin’ balls. I’m thinking of Benicio del Toro in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Add to that rogue’s gallery of scenery chewers Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood.

These movies pass through our lives, take up two hours of our time, and go along their merry way. Recently I enjoyed Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve, Orson Welles’s masterful Touch of Evil, and a collection of Pixar shorts.

Remember when The Illusionist and The Prestige both vied to be the winter 2007 movie about magicians? No? Anyway, transport yourself back to those fabled days of January and February 2007. I know what you’re thinking. You were too busy obsessing over the surprising resignation of Kazakhstan’s Prime Minister Daniyal Akhmetov and Japan’s incineration of over 10,000 chickens to battle the bird flu to concern yourself with a magician movie-off.

Hey Eyeballers. I haven’t had the patience to watch anything over an hour long recently. I take that back. I watched Babe with my son a couple weekends ago and as always got choked up at the end. I am a total sucker for talking swine who defy expectations.

One weird symptom of watching old movies, for me at least, is that I find myself imagining what the original audiences thought of them. I suppose this goes back to the anecdotes I’ve heard about The Great Train Robbery (1904), which caused viewers to dive under their seats when a bandit points his gun at the camera.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of interviewing Guy Maddin, the great Canadian auteur and subject of previous Eyeball posts. We spoke for about an hour and a half; he was so generous and real that I ended up just wanting to be his friend forever.

Tuesday night I had the pleasure of reading a short story at therumpus.net’s Seattle launch party, prior to a screening of the film Pig Hunt. Director Jim Isaac served up guns, blood, taxidermy, boobs, motor bikes, hippies, wild boars, and weed, and what’s not to love about that?

Yesterday I got laid off from my day job at a tech company. This got me thinking about an unpublished essay I wrote a couple years ago about my relationship to the Terry Gilliam film Brazil. Here it is. –Ryan

I had two comfy movie-watching experiences this weekend. On Friday I watched the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading with my wife and yesterday sat down with my son to watch the Brad Bird animated movie The Iron Giant.

Rumpus Original Column

Ryan Boudinot is the author of the short story collection The Littlest Hitler (2006) and the novel Misconception. He was a DVD Editor at Amazon.com from 2003 to 2007. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and other journals and anthologies. He lives in Seattle and teaches creative writing at Goddard College's Port Townsend MFA program.

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